[lit-ideas] Re: "Things" (Dinge) by Rainer Maria Rilke
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 21:50:57 +0100 (BST)
--- On Sat, 30/7/11, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Lovely, and wise.
John>
Well, lovely perhaps [a matter of aesthetics?]. But wise [a philosophical
issue?]?
Of course, maybe I have misunderstood: but Rilke's point might be more
prosaically put as 'we should be patient and let nature takes its course'. Is
this wise? Sometimes perhaps. But sometimes we should perhaps be impatient with
what would otherwise be the natural course of things and we should interfere so
as to change what would otherwise be the natural course of things: that may be
wise too. In the case of 'a natural course of things' about which we can do
nothing, we should perhaps be patient - as impatience achieves nothing; and we
should avoid the exercise in futility of trying to change what cannot be
changed. But this comes to the wisdom of knowing the difference between what
can be changed and what cannot, and of knowing what is worth changing; and on
this Rilke's poem is (perhaps not entirely wisely) one-sided, tendentiously
focusing on what seemingly cannot be changed.
Commonsense aphorisms reflect the fact that almost every pearl of wisdom of
this sort has its equal and opposite 'truth': 'many hands makes light
work'/'too many cooks spoil the broth';'a stitch in time saves nine'/'more
haste, less speed' etc. This does not mean commonsense is riven with
contradictions so much that life presents us with problems or dilemmas which
require judgment to solve or resolve; and the correctness of that judgment will
depend on whether it is appropriate to the specifics of a given situation. So
the second unwise aspect of Rilke's poem, if relied on too seriously as
considered wisdom, is that it is over-generalised in its approach.
Third, there is a typically romantic or utopian aspect to how the poem views
nature and its course - one that is doubtful intellectually, whatever its
emotional appeal. Consider the opening statement:-
" One must allow things
Their own silent
Undisturbed development,
That comes from deep within
And can by nothing be forced
Or expedited"
This is either some metaphysical claim that can only be maintained as true in
some untestable sense or, if given a testable sense, it clearly paints a false
picture of nature. Taking even a "tree", its development can be "expedited" or
"curtailed" by environmental changes [this is because, "deep within", a tree
has evolved to respond to certain environmental changes e.g. drought or flood;
this might be also or better put - the "trees" that have survived are those
with the evolved capacity to withstand environmental challenges that otherwise
would have eliminated them]. We might allow that the "tree" grows in a "silent"
way (at least to human ears), but it is simply a false picture of nature to
consider that its natural course consists in some "(u)ndisturbed development".
In fact, though very generalised, it would be much more accurate to say that
all developments of organic life are subject to disturbance, to environmental
or other 'outside' impacts. We
can of course beg the question here by defining some such environmental or
outside effects as 'natural' [as rain may be thought 'natural' to the tree],
but this cannot be done without rendering the notion of 'nature' so wide as to
be vacuous [trees can survive in rainless environments provided they find
another way to access water, and this is hardly 'unnatural']: and even then
this would only hide the underlying point - that it is in an organism's
capacity to respond and adapt to outside or environmental 'variations', that we
get the measure of its adaptive capacity - and, given that environments are not
entirely static, an organism that was only adapted to one completely unvarying
habitat would be 'unwise'.
There are other questionable aspects to the poem as 'philosophy', including its
veiled suggestion that wisdom simply comes in due course [rather than never, or
only rarely and after much effort], but I feel there is no need to ruin things
any further. Nevertheless, insofar as the poem addresses a problem (rather than
merely express a somewhat one-sided, over-generalised and questionable 'poetic'
feeling or intuition), we do not have to solve the problem like Maria.
Donal
London
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